Preface xvnot only accepted the script of my play titledHaba Director!for staging by
the company of the Dramatic Arts Department which he then headed,
he in fact made suggestions about incorporating some topical issues into
the play, suggestions which were willingly accepted because of the satiric
bite which they gave to the production.
I have made the foregoing “declaration” because, inevitably, the ex-
perience that it narrates does provide a point of departure for this study.
For me, and I daresay for other members of that now sadly moribund
Ibadan-Ife Group, perhaps the most important aspect of Soyinka’s works
and activities, the thing that made him so vital to the prospects we then
felt for real meaningful social and economic transformations in Nigeria
and Africa, was a dimension of art, literature and culture that we did
not pay much heed to in those battles with Soyinka, this being what
can roughly be called thesubjectivedimensions of artistic creativity and
cultural politics. Soyinka’s proud assertion in the heat of those quarrels
thathewas personally beyond “coercion” and intimidation by us and
our invocation of the “objective,” “determinate” forces of history speaks
to the heart of this matter. Let us recall again the profile I have drawn
above of Soyinka in the editorial offices ofTransitionin Accra in
which shows the writer-activist engaged in those herculean tasks of mo-
bilizing continental and worldwide opposition to the murderous violence
of the regime of Idi Amin, putting in place the machinery for the smooth
and effective functioning of the then newly formed Union of Writers
of the African Peoples, all the while continuing to write in all genres of
literature.
These issues constitute the conceptual foundations of this study and
shaped the methodological choices I have made in organizing the con-
tents of the book. As a deliberate departure from the common trend
in Soyinka criticism of taking his exceptionally strong personality for
granted, I have made it a focal point for exploring his literary corpus in
its own right. Moreover, I have deployed this focus on “subjectivity” to
explore the deep imbrication of Soyinka’s writings in the cultural pat-
terns and dominant ideological discourses and representations of what
I call the postcolonial national-masculine “sublime” which, in my view,
decisively shaped Soyinka’s own personality and the collective identity of
his generation of artists, writers and critics and indeed an entire period
of postcolonial history in Africa and the rest of the developing world.
For it is no accident of history or circumstance that Soyinka belongs to a
generation of the Nigerian literary intelligentsia whose leading members
like Chinua Achebe, J.P. Clark, Christopher Okigbo and Soyinka himself